Opening night dud serves as reminder that Sabres remain a work in progress

The Buffalo Sabres are almost universally believed to have an extremely bright future.

Not many teams have a core as impressive as Tage Thompson, Rasmus Dahlin, Owen Power and Dylan Cozens, and after Buffalo extended both Dahlin and Power before their 2023-24 season began that quartet is locked in through 2029-30.

This group doesn't lack talent beyond those four players, either.

It also features established offensive threats like Jeff Skinner and Alex Tuch as well as a number of up-and-comers in its bottom-six. Mattias Samuelson could give the team 20 tough minutes per night for the rest of the decade, Casey Mittelstadt started to find his way last season and rookie goaltender Devon Levi has plenty of promise coming off a stellar NCAA career.

There are plenty of good things you could say about the talent the Sabres have collected and — with respect to a solid secondary scorer in Victor Olofsson — none of the team's most important players are hitting unrestricted free agency any time soon.

Buffalo's excellent team-building efforts in recent years have led to plenty of hype surrounding the franchise entering 2023-24, as many projected them to break the longest active playoff drought in the NHL.

That's a distinct possibility for this squad, but its first game of the season — a 5-1 loss to the New York Rangers — served up a reminder Buffalo's present isn't as transparently promising as its future.

Although there's no shame in losing to a quality Rangers team, this game provided some evidence the Sabres still have hurdles to overcome before they reach their potential.

Buffalo's offensive firepower is beyond reproach. The club ranked third in the NHL in goals in 2022-23, and many of its key contributors are young enough to keep improving. Being held to a single score by elite netminder Igor Shesterkin isn't particularly concerning.

The difficulty the team had keeping pucks out of its own net last season certainly looked like they could persist, though. Within the first five minutes of Thursday's game, Henri Jokiharju (No. 10) lost Alexis Lafrenière in the sauce, allowing New York to take an early lead.

Another crucial defensive lapse came in the third as Dahlin somehow failed to corral Mika Zibanejad and prevent a short-handed goal, immediately smashing his stick against the boards in frustration when Chris Krieder put it in.

While it's impossible to blame Levi on those goals, no goaltender wants to allow unscreened shots through from the high slot, even from a gifted scorer in Artemi Panarin.

Levi's outing was far from disastrous, but he's a big part of a goal-suppression apparatus worthy of skepticism.

Dahlin and Power are universally considered to be strong investments by Buffalo, but they are still coming into their own with a combined age of 43. Thursday was a good example of the kind of bumpy game the first-overall picks will occasionally have as neither posted an on-ice expected goal rate above 30% at 5v5.

Beyond that duo, Samuelsson is more of a solid piece than a shutdown presence while Jokiharu, Erik Johnson and Connor Clifton are veterans who don't inspire too much confidence. There are shakier bluelines in the league, to be certain, but this isn't an ironclad group to put in front of a goaltender with eight games of NHL experience.

Levi is the highest-variance piece of the puzzle here. It seems likely the rookie will be able to lead a crease that can improve on what the team got in 2022-23 when its goaltenders combined for an .896 save percentage. That doesn't mean he can turn the Sabres into a team that snuffs out opposing offenses on a consistent basis.

There is absolutely no reason for Buffalo to panic after a single game, but Thursday provided a hint that some caution around the team's hype train might be warranted.